Katie Von Schleicher: ‘I have a lot of anger. I think most women do’

Following the release of her new album, Consummation, the Brooklyn-based artist talks to Roisin O’Connor about Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the MeToo movement, and female rage

'I want music to be pulverising. Not to be dramatic, but for it to commit to whatever the artist is trying to express' (Annie Del Hierro)

Few artists do white-hot fury quite like Katie Von Schleicher. Her lo-fi 2015 mini-album, Bleaksploitation, was described by one critic as “histrionic”, which she has previously said rattled her because it was “a word my mom repeated throughout my childhood to shame other women who were emotional, or to imply they were unstable”. On its follow-up, 2017’s Shitty Hits – pitched as “Portishead meets The Beatles” – she opened with “The Image”, a brutal, frustrated exhalation. And on her new album, Consummation, she erupts with searing honesty about how, on one new song, “You Remind Me”, she “can’t confine my rage”. Her music is full of the same visceral energy that drives artists such as Sharon Van Etten, Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple.

The New York-based musician’s songs are such a candid unburdening that it is perhaps unsurprising to hear that she often finds conveying emotions in real life a challenge. Specifically, how to level her frustration at men. “I’ve struggled to feel graceful with anger,” she says. “I don’t feel this talking to women. But I’ve struggled with trying to find a language that translates out [to others].” She says of a past romantic relationship how, “I felt if I could just find the right words to express myself, I wouldn’t make someone so angry at me.” In her music, she self-flagellates with jagged piano chords, her voice raining down on each track like gasoline to which she lights the match.

Von Schleicher’s new record has distilled this intensity into something catchier, poppier, but still honest and full of zeal, with buzzsaw distortion on the guitars – sharp enough to take a man’s head clean off – and dangerously silky vocals. She speaks over Zoom from her airy (“insanely cheap”), light-filled apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the 33-year-old moved from her hometown in Pasadena, Maryland, having graduated with a degree in songwriting from Berklee College of Music in Boston. The living room is filled with stacks of books arranged in a kind of ordered chaos. Behind her is a smaller room with an upright piano. The window in the living room is open, letting the sounds of her street filter through; a man in a pick-up truck outside begins blaring his horn. Von Schleicher tells me some of the vocal takes on this album have hip-hop in the background from the times her neighbours would blast their beats from the pavement below.